


elskaði (beloved)

by meritmut



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Babies, F/M, Fluff, Fluff without Plot, Prompt Fic, Vignette, loosely-connected non-sequential babbyfic oneshots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-20
Updated: 2018-04-23
Packaged: 2019-04-25 02:34:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14369034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: Rey can’t quite wrap her head around it—the fact that there exists, in the world, an entire human person small enough to fit into the crook of her arm. It shouldn’t be possible.Not for a human withhimfor a father, anyway.





	1. hold my heart till brighter days

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for thea, ty to trish for the proof <3

She’s so tiny. Rey can’t quite wrap her head around it—the fact that there exists, in the world, an entire human person small enough to fit into the crook of her arm. It shouldn’t be possible.

Not for a human with  _him_  for a father, anyway.

 _Him,_  who hasn’t managed to say a word since he folded himself into the space at her side and gathered them both up into his arms like he never plans on letting them go again.

“I don’t,” he mumbles into her hair, his breath hot over her ear, “ever.”

The space between their minds is membrane-thin, in this moment: there’s nothing to keep Ben from picking up on the amused tenor of her thoughts.

Rey turns her face into his neck so he can feel her smile. She’s fine with that, more or less, but she feels as though she should probably warn him. “You’ll be carrying me to the ‘fresher in a minute, then.”

“Alright.”

“And back again.”

“Gladly.” She can see it, in his mind, how ready he is to do it. How committed he is to the vague resolve of never letting her out of his arms ever again.

And honestly, Rey’s lower half is one big ache: she’s almost tempted to take him up on it.

“Or,” she says instead, easing her tender body a little further up the bed so she can begin the process of getting out of it, “you two can spend some time getting to know one another.”

She doesn’t  _want_  to leave the bed. Leaving means letting go of her little family, precious and hard-won and safe. Leaving means passing Breha over to Ben and extricating herself from the combined warmth of everything she loves most in this life, and it’s the absolute last thing she wants to do.

But…she’s been ignoring the mounting pressure on her bladder for half an hour now, and she doesn’t entirely trust her own insides after what they’ve just been through.

Besides—she isn’t actually  _leaving,_  not really. The next room isn’t so far, even if the first step away from Ben and Breha feels like lightyears.

She helps him get settled with the baby in his arms, one giant hand cupping her little head and his thumb brushing over the shock of dark hair already growing there with a gentleness that catches in Rey’s heart.

Till now, he has reserved that gentleness for her—for Rey and, more recently, for the growing spark of life inside her. She’s seen it whenever he looks at her in that way of his, soft and proud and  _fierce_  like his love for her is the fire in which he willingly, gladly burns. She hears it in his murmured praise and halting avowals of devotion; she  _feels_  it when he touches her, when he treasures her with his hands and worships her with his mouth; when he loves her and challenges her and makes her laugh, when he lets her know in every way he can think of just what she is to him.

To know that their daughter, this beautiful thing that they have made together, holds the same place in his heart…to know that she is no less cherished by her father, fills Rey with a kind of steady peace she’s never felt before.

(Not that she’d ever doubted it. Ben has been wholly and unabashedly  _smitten_  with Breha since the moment they first felt her, and has only fallen further in love as the spark grew into something luminous. He’d spent  _hours_  sprawled out beside Rey on their bed, whispering through the Force in quiet communion with the little no-name in her belly till sometimes it felt like there were three people living in her head. It’s different, though, now that Breha’s  _here,_  the whole world suffused with the light of her bright little soul.)

Rey hadn’t really had the chance to look at them together, when Ben held Breha for the first time. He’d had her for a little while just after she was born, cradling her in his massive hands and blinking up at an exhausted Rey as if he couldn’t quite believe any of this was real: this will be the first time he’s been left alone with her, and Rey can see in his face just how he’s feeling about that.

Namely,  _petrified_.

She lifts a hand to brush the hair back out of his eyes and Ben doesn’t so much as twitch, his gaze still fixed on their girl’s tiny pink face. Breha stares right back up at him, so alert and  _aware_  for one so young, a newborn universe glimmering in her wide blue eyes.

Will they become his eyes? He’s already there in her hair, in the ears she’ll grow into one day (the ears Rey has already decided she loves more than anything).

There’s a strange hollow feeling in her abdomen but Rey’s heart has never been so full as she watches them watch each other. They might as well be the only two things left—lost in each other’s stare, oblivious to the fact that a world exists beyond the pair of them.

And her, Rey thinks, as she slips into the ‘fresher and closes the door quietly behind her. That’s her world too, out there on the bed. Her future.

 _Their_  future.

They’ll face it together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title from 'good love' by bat for lashes


	2. further down the storyline

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _She’ll be the most loved,_ Rey says, the night their little no-name first makes her presence known. _I mean it. No one will ever be more loved than her. More wanted._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for annie, ty to trish again <3

Afternoon’s clear sky gives way to the lavender of evening, the lake’s edge wreathed in smoky blue. A sweet-scented twilight is settling over the world as the day’s heat loosens its grip but it is not wholly night; not yet.

It is the middling of the year. Summer is sovereign here, and every living thing is subject to the unhurried arc of the suns across the sky, teasing out the days into torpid seasons of humidity and burnished light. They languish in a cloudless haze on the horizon now, fading rays turning everything they touch to gold.

Ben goes from room to room, switching on lamps as evening deepens until the house is filled with light again.

He is not afraid of the dark, or of anything in it—even the things that whisper in the small hours when there’s no one awake to hear but him; nowhere to turn but dreaming’s deeper darkness to escape them—but there is a worn kind of comfort in the rituals of readying the house for nightfall, which on an evening like this can feel like magic.

Old magic: low magic, woven from the well-trodden path his feet take through the cottage, from the shadows gathering thick as dust in every corner and the whirring hum of insects out in the garden. This place is not like other places. The world cannot find them here.

If he tells himself so often enough, he thinks, maybe one day he’ll start to believe it.

Until then, it is enough that _she_ believes.

The door at the end of the hallway stands open, soft golden light already spilling from within. Ben pauses on the threshold, his heart turning quiet somersaults in his chest, his throat tight with emotion.

A handful of months aren’t enough time to have grown used to _this_ being his life.

Rey is lying in the middle of the bed, their ten-week-old daughter sprawled out on her chest. They’re both sleeping soundly, the baby wriggling fitfully as she dreams, but one of Rey’s hands curls loosely over her back to hold her safe next to her heart.

The window is open to let in the cool air off the lake, but evening in summer means _bugs_ and Ben has lain awake listening to the soft patter of mothwings against the glass often enough to know better.

Rey’s eyelids flutter when he crosses the room to close it, just enough that he can see the dark glint of her observing him through her lashes. Not sleeping after all, then. Her fingers splay over Breha’s back in an involuntary reflex, tightening as if to reassure herself their girl’s still there.

Ben recognises that reflex.

It had been a revelation to him, the bone-deep instinct to keep Breha near. He hadn’t known what to expect from fatherhood and he could never have known how he would be changed by it: how feeling his daughter in the Force for the first time would fill him with an effusion of love that will never dim.

How he would be remade, his whole world reshaping itself the first time he held her in his arms.

Her solid little weight is a familiar joy to him now, her bright light in the Force as much a part of his consciousness as Rey’s. He is _surrounded_ by light, here with the two of them, his twin suns: he is made whole by it.

And Breha—well, Ben doesn’t think she’s been out of someone’s arms since the moment she was born. She sleeps in between her parents, grasping at their fingers with her tiny hands, and spends her waking hours being cuddled and crooned over and adored by her extended family.

 _She’ll be the most loved,_ Rey says, the night their little no-name first makes her presence known. _I mean it. No one will ever be more loved than her. More wanted._

 _No,_ he agrees, still more than a little dazed by the news that he is to be a father. The only thing keeping him in his body is Rey: the compact strength of her beside him, the feather-light trails her fingers mark over his forearms, the beating of her heart where her back presses up against his chest.

 _I love her, so much, already,_ she admits in a hushed, trembling voice _. I—I never thought I could feel like this. That I could—_

 _I know,_ Ben tightens his arms around her, presses his face into her neck and takes a shuddering breath of her familiar, beloved scent. He does know. Even without the bond he would recognise the feeling she describes. _I feel it too._

Silently, loath to disturb the baby when she’s finally, miraculously _asleep,_ Ben eases his weight onto the bed beside them. Breha’s body shifts with the rise and fall of Rey’s chest, her tiny hands making fists against the softness of her mother’s skin, but mercifully, she sleeps on.

He shuffles further onto the bed so he can lie beside the two of them, resting his forehead against Rey’s shoulder and bending his knees to bring himself as close as he can. She turns her head toward him, her free hand coming up to find his and weave their fingers together.

Her hands have softened, in the years since she left Jakku. Not wholly, and maybe they never will, because the life she leads is an active one and the life before that has left its scars, but enough that the gentle scrape of her scarred knuckles is nothing but pleasurable when Ben brings their joined hands up and presses his lips to them.

He loves her hands, how strong and capable and sure they are. He loves how perfectly they fit into his, how confidently they move in work or training, how _right_ they look cradling Breha protectively against her breast.

(He loves how they feel, wrapped around him; how she can encircle him and become his whole world with nothing more than her lightest touch.)

He lifts his other hand to join hers on Breha’s back. The baby snuffles, nuzzling further into Rey as Ben rubs his thumb between her delicate scapulae.

When he glances up again, Rey’s gazing at him with a tenderness that makes his chest hurt.

“What is it?” he murmurs, moving to brush his knuckles over her jaw. Her eyes drift closed as she leans into his touch, then open again to drown him in the depth of the affection there.

“Love you,” she says softly. She’s glowing in the light of the lamps, her loose chestnut hair falling around her like a halo, and Ben loses his breath and his heart to her all over again.

He swallows. _I love you, too. Both of you. I’m yours, every part of me. I love you, I love you, I love you,_ it’s pushing at him from the inside, the fierceness of his devotion fighting to escape like his heart is trying to climb up through his throat.

No—it isn’t his heart.

It’s _words._

“Marry me,” he whispers, before he’s fully processed the feeling that swells up inside him. It washes over him like the tide, like the wind; like dawn breaking over the sea.

Then— _oh._

Ben sinks his teeth into his lower lip like he can bite back the words and lock them inside but it’s too late, there’s no unsaying them, and from the way Rey’s eyes have gone wide he knows there’s no chance of her unhearing them either.

_Do you want them unheard? Did you not mean them?_

_Have you ever meant anything more?_

She’s gone awfully quiet.

When he murmurs her name her gaze flits back up to his, her tawny eyes filled with uncertainty.

(In the Force she is _luminous,_ she is the brightest thing on this or any world, but that’s nothing new and in the grip of this sudden anxiety Ben perceives only the hesitation in her face.)

“Marry you?” she echoes, as if she hadn’t quite heard—or doesn’t quite believe, still doubtful, even now, that he might want her.

Even now, in this bed and this home they share, the daughter they made together safe in her arms, there is a part of her that will always fear the day the dream dissolves and she is left alone again.

_Oh, love…_

(That day will never come while he has any say in it.)

Holding fast to the mad courage that had allowed the proposal to escape in the first place, Ben nods. “If you–” he clears his throat, pushes past the stubborn knot of nerves lodged in his windpipe because he isn’t blind enough to miss the hope growing brighter in her eyes and he’ll tear out his _heart_ before he lets that light die. “If you want.”

And if she doesn’t? If this is a step too far, what then?

He cannot let himself think of it, of the possibility that she might say no.

But she doesn’t.

“Alright,” she says, a radiant smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “Yeah. Yeah, alright.”

Ben stares. Double-checks, just in case his ears are deceiving him. “Really?”

Rolling her eyes, Rey leans toward him, careful not to dislodge the baby as she nudges his nose with hers. “Yes, you nerf.”

Ben can’t keep the wide smile from breaking over his face at her words—or at the little yelp that escapes her when he surges forward to kiss her, bringing his hand up again to slide it over her jaw and into her hair. He parts her lips with his tongue and _oh, Force_ _,_ she sighs so sweetly into his mouth that he wants nothing more than to press her into the bed and love her till the stars come down, but with Breha still fast asleep between them he can’t do much more than deepen the kiss, pouring into the movement of his mouth over Rey's everything he wants to do—everything he _would_ be doing were their baby girl not nestled between their bodies.

Still, as Rey smiles against his lips, picking up on the thread of his thoughts and tightening her grip on his collar to let him know she’s on the same page, it occurs to Ben that there are definitely worse problems to have.

They waited longer than this, to be together. They’re in no hurry.

They have forever, after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title from 'fold' by ionnalee


End file.
